All around me darkness gathers,
Fading is the sun that shone;
We must speak of other matters:
You can be me when I'm gone.

www.mengwong.com

Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on;
Still are withered in the evening:
You can be me when I'm gone.

Being human is funny strange. You begin. Then
you go away from where you began. You hold hands for a
while. Then you let go. When you go back to where you
began, it all looks different but still smells the same.

20031024. My latest project is SPF. I really believe if
SPF sees fast widespread adoption we can stop spam sooner
than you think. I have presented it at OScon, ISPcon, and
Foo Camp and it's gaining momentum fast. A story
about the ASRG reconciliation mentions SPF. Woo hoo.

20021019. New gadgets in my life: A Nokia 6310i
will work anywhere there's GSM and because it has Bluetooth
I can take
my iBook online pretty much anywhere. That's good,
because when I'm out geocaching
with the Garmin
Etrex Vista, I can, uh, log my GPS finds right
away. Note: material possessions still don't necessarily lead to happiness ... it all depends what you do with them :)

I tell mutt to PGP-sign my email. One day someone will
hold up some writing with my name at the bottom, and I will say, "but I didn't write
that. If I had written it, I would have signed it." Help yourself to my pgp 5.0i public key.

20021114. Joel wrote a great piece about The
Law of Leaky Abstractions. It explains why, if you want
to be a great photographer, you should get an SLR and
process your own black and white for a while before you get
a digital camera and forget all that stuff. But then, maybe
even before you get the SLR, you should also take some
drawing classes, and art history classes, and learn about
photochemistry, and have some basic optical physics under
your belt ... and suddenly you're well on your way to
becoming a Renaissance man.

It's the understanding of this rational
intellectual idea that's fundamental. John looks at the
motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has
negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the
whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I
see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on
concepts.

Open-faucet
people have the patience to sit and quietly look at
things that others would find "boring". They're getting
more input from the world --- enough datapoints to draw a
line through them --- and they become mappers.
The closed-faucet packers don't get enough input to develop
a reliable model of the world, and so they end up coping on
an anecdotal, case-by-case basis. This is one of the few
lessons that Zen Buddhism tries to teach: that, faced with
an object, it is better to surrender yourself to sensing and
understanding it on its own terms than to fret, "what is it
good for? what does it cost? what is it called? are we
done yet? can we go now?"

Getz's knowledge of the dunes is so thorough and so
intimate that mushroom hunting with him is strictly a
spectator sport. When we went out together he let me
find a few, but it was rather like going Easter egg
hunting with the person who hid the eggs. He moved
quickly and silently through the forest, stopping only at
known matsutake spots long enough to deftly run his
fingertips over the sand, as though massaging it lightly.
By this method he is able to locate the prized matsutake
buttons while they are still deep under the moss and
sand, invisible to everyone else. Time and again, where
I saw nothing to indicate a mushroom --- not the
slightest mound in the moss nor telltale crack in the
sand --- he would insert his forked fingers like a
divining rod, locate a mushroom deep underneath, and
then, after grasping and twisting it gently, pull it out
of the ground like a white rabbit out of a hat.

"I've been gifted with this ability to key into certain
things," he says with understatement. "When I'm
predicting the pop, I measure the growth on the trees,
an' then time it to the weather bounces. It's all with
the triggering of the sap [in the trees] goin' up an
down. And there's this density to the air. The
ground lifts up about a half of an inch, becomes fluffy
an' the sand sticks to yer finger, one grain's layer,
almost like it was sprayed with hairspray. That tells me
they're there. Then when you get in the heat of the
season, just before a big flush, it feels like there's
steel wool mixed in the sand, [because] all those little
filaments [mushroom hyphae] are really pumped." In
mycological circles, mushrooms simply aren't talked about
this way; I've never seen a mycologist uncover 20 pounds
of invisible grade-one matsutake, either.

20011002. After WTC. The American media, taking a
lesson from Bill Maher, have been silent on a number of
angles which could be considered unpatriotic. This is both
wise (media as business) and irresponsible (media as
journalism). To get the full picture, turn to the foreign
media (eg Robert Fisk) and the US independent media (eg Salon), a mix of which is highlighted in
Dave Farber's Interesting-People list.

20010721. Since I joined Netflix I've averaged six
movies a month. The unit of my Movie Rating Scale is in
Number Of Times Worth Seeing In The Theater:

1.0

means I felt my time was well spent (The Princess And The Warrior),

2.0

means I'd be willing to go twice (Matrix),

0.5

means wait for video (Castaway)

1.5

means watch it on the big screen and rent it again later (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

0.1

means don't spend too much time on it: see it, if only because everybody else has, but on fast-forward (The Beach)

20010328. Napster is being really stupid. Let's take
a moment and separate napster the technology from napster
the company. Napster the company has dug in its heels and
seems to be prepared for a fight to the death for a free
music system in violation of copyright law. If there was
money to be made there, maybe that attitude could be
supportable somehow. But there are no revenues down that
road. So let's leave the company out of it for now and look
at what could be done with the technology.

First, let's assume that the record companies desire to move
forward with the technology instead of resisting it. Surely
there are some forward thinking execs who see where this is
all headed anyway, and rather than sticking their heads in
the sand, want to have some say about the final outcome.
Assuming Napster the technology is here to stay, where are
the money making opportunities? Let's frame the question
this way: what would it take for labels to fight to get
their stuff released on napster as opposed to gnutella,
freenet, etc? What would it take for labels to release
quality mp3 rips of their own music? Scoff not; this could
be.

Suppose napster set up a cddb-style metainfo architecture so
that each song, when downloaded through the client, carried
a little "click here to buy the album" ad banner / link.
After all, people are claiming they're buying albums based
on napster downloads, that napster helps sell more music,
not less. If you could prove this proposition through a
sort of referer-url clickthrough scheme, you're set. There
are dozens of ways to do it. If you were too dumb to
partner with CDDB so rippers naturally encoded "how to buy"
information into MP3's native ID tag scheme, you could use
steganography technology to digitally encode the album and
sale information into songs directly, like digimarc puts
copyright info pictures. I mean, come on, people, this is
the Internet era. Figure out a simple data distribution
mechanism already.

Now, the record companies probably want to retain the power
of a well-oiled marketing apparatus creating a few "big"
artists. I have no argument with that: if the "natural"
Pareto curve of the music industry looks like a few big
Britneys and a lot of little Phishes, fine: that's a bigger
battle than I'm going to fight.

The music industry is quite familiar with the indie
structure of a few gatekeepers controlling access to airplay
to make hits. If that's what they want, napster can give
them that: build in a pay for play technology so that
Napster Radio gives preferred labels higher priority on
search results.

Napster could make a mint on commissions from labels. X
cents per clickthrough on albums actually sold.

It's all about alignment. Napster the technology could get
along great with the record industry. Napster the company
is just being contrary for the sake of being contrary. But
hey, Shawn Fanning wears his baseball cap backward. It's
just what happens when your CEO is 19.

20010317. If you agree that the natural unit of
biological evolution is the generation, and you agree that
in general, over the span of human history, women have had
children at a younger age than men, then over the same
period of time, there have been more generations of women
than generations of men. And therefore, loosely speaking,
female traits are more evolved than male traits. Therefore,
females in general are the result of more evolution and more
natural selection. Following the principle of neoteny, we
should expect men in another 30,000 years to have no beards,
etc, more feminine features. This thought was partly
brought to you by Matt Ridley's The Red Queen.

Erikson's personal identity theory basically says that you
go through several stages of life, and at each stage you
have a sort of conflict between two alternatives, one good
and one bad; you resolve the conflict (hopefully, good
triumphs), and move forward to the next level.

Somewhere in his writings Erikson makes the casual comment
that if things go poorly at a certain stage N it is possible
for the patient to regress to N-1. That stroke of insight
made it possible for me to appreciate Ultimo Tango in a
whole new way!

It explains why Paul insists that as a
precondition of his affair-romance with Jeanne neither
character should say anything about their history, their
past, so that they might meet and just indulge a sort of
degraded version of intimacy without any real context, any
knowing of the other person. This precondition really just
means that only Paul doesn't want to talk about his past.
In perfect accordance with erikson we proceed to find out
that this strange episode in his life only began when his
wife died.

So death of spouse is a failure of stage 6 (intimacy),
leading to a regression to the very beginning of stage 5
(identity) represented by his repression of his past.

20000105. The corporate sovereignties predicted by
Gibson's zaibatsus and Stephenson's franchise nations have
cracked the manufacturing chrysalis of the 20th century.
Many stocks are a lot like some real estate: a pure
investment justified not on the basis of a revenue stream
but on capital appreciation alone. Or look at it another
way: you could simply say that the
stocks of huge global corporations are taking on the nature
of foreign exchange currency. You can use them to buy
and sell other companies, and if that doesn't make them
money, I don't know what does.

20000105. It won't be long before western business
paradigm-shifts fully into the ecological model and we start
talking about companies using words like "lifespan",
"generations", "family", and "death". It's really the only
way to take the inefficiencies out of bureaucratic r&d,
inexperienced startups, and innovation-by-buying. More to
follow.

20000105. I see Borders merging with Amazon within 12
months. It's the only way for them to transcend the status
quo. If you think about it, they're exactly complementary:
a combined Bormazon category killer could print you a map of
your local branch showing exactly where to find books you
want to preview; and it could feature same-day priority
delivery when you can't wait for overnight. Without
Amazon's enormous microdemographic database Borders can't do
recommendations. Without Borders's distribution channels
Amazon can't do same-day and browsing fulfillment.
(substitute Barnes & Noble for Borders according to
personal taste --- but whoever gets there first will blow
away the other. compatibility / network effect, and for
now, Amazon is Microsoft.)

20000104. mystarhub.com.sg
recently upped the ante: internet access in singapore is now
free of all ISP charges. being a POTS telco provider in
addition to being an ISP they just make money on the basic
phone rate. now if they were REALLY clever they'd put their
proxy to work ripping out the original banner ads and
selling the space to local industry.

19991203. Converge concepts from EarthWeb and my
suggestion to Amazon. One feature of my upcoming BookZone
will be this: i want to recommend a book to you. i buy it
for you as a gift through amazon.com, at cost to me. if you
read it and like it, you reimburse me the cost of the book
plus 10%. if i get good at recommending books to people, i
make a profit. if i'm not good, i lose.

19991201. Ask me about Bibliomatic and Preferred Practices.

19991030. Let's talk political economy. There's the government
sector, and there's the private sector. What do governments
provide? Operating systems for human societies. And they
fund it from taxes. You need infrastructure; government is
a necessary evil. But the real value comes from commercial
entities who provide third-party services.

Jane
Jacobs explains that the two human traditions of
politics and commerce each come with their own set of
fundamentally different moral values. Keep them separated,
or you risk tyrannical monopolies, state-run economies.

It maps to technology. You can be in government (operating
systems) or you can be in commerce (applications).
Corporations are used to competition. Coke vs Pepsi ---
that's just business as usual. But governments are
sovereign, territorial. USA vs Iraq --- that's war.

Similarly, applications battling for market share
(eg. Quicken vs MsMoney) is mere business as usual. But
Linux vs Microsoft is all-out war. The metaphors come
from the language of political revolution. Overthrow Bill
Gates, they cry. Linux is about freedom. Open government.
It's really about politics. No wonder people get fired up.

Yesterday. By controlling the OS+GUI arena,
Microsoft got to tax the desktop world. (And by tying its
apps to the OS, it created state-run monopolies. Enter the
Justice Department, and the antitrust lawsuit.)

Today. Microsoft cleaned up good, but that was
just the desktop world. Palm+Handspring have made the leap
--- they get to tax the handheld world now, because they
control the OS+GUI. Hardware developers are flocking to the
Visor the way they used to flock to the IBM PC.

Tomorrow. Handhelds are a permanent niche. But they
aren't a primary technology. Wearables are on the way.
And whoever corners that OS+GUI niche will be the next
Microsoft.

For the sake of all our children, I hope the opensource guys
get there first.

199909. banner ads suck. internet advertising is wrong. push
advertising is wrong. just look at the search engines: people don't really
want a haystack of choice. they want their choices made, they want options
narrowed down, they want recommendations from friends. they want to find
fixes to their rare but shared situations. linux problems? go to deja and
you'll find someone with exactly your configuration, who had your problem,
and solved it. that's what people want. take customer-centered to the
extreme. not just "customers", circled and powerpointed. "Ignatius
O. Herschendorfer, born 1963, of Winossas, Ohio." put that at the
center and work your way out, with amazon-style taste predictors. jeans
and liquor are push; they say "this is what the cool mainstreamers are
pretending to do, and don't you want to be cool?" the old paradigm was the
only paradigm simply because microdemographics weren't available, so the
supply-side concept of the mainstream was necessary to create the mass
consumer. but as every storyteller knows, don't tell; evoke. allow them
to pull, and they will. "you're cool in your own way already, and here's
what your soulmates are into." portals have a chance to make the
transition, but they're not customizable enough. it's an open problem.

199909. Jakob Nielsen agrees:
internet advertising is an anachronism, like your mother
putting on her daughter's makeup and trying to sneak into a
rave. i have no idea how all these free services are going
to last. don't hostmail, usa.net, hotpop customers all
realize that they're getting suckered? they're not the
customers here. they're the sheep. the advertisers are the
customers, and they're beginning to see the light. you get
what you pay for, and one day it will bite you. clickthroughs have been dropping 50% every year. when tulips
don't sprout they turn into mud.

199909. don norman is right, of course. computers are too complex.
the newton failed because it tried to cram all the power of a desktop into
a sub-notebook with no keyboard. the palmpilot succeeded because it
competes with paper. so what if the battery fails; i just hotsync. so
what if the computer fails; i just hotsync.

199909. opensource your business practices. total transparency; your
suppliers and customers will thank you for it. like fedex, but not just
shipments; everything else, too. every customer service transaction.
every account receivable and payable. visible from the outside world.
keeps you honest. but that's just transparency. opensource goes one step
further: document the way you work, then share it. mergers and
acquisitions become mere optimizations. extreme caricature: make even
strategic competitive decisions transparent. network advantages outweigh
security by obscurity. tell your competitors your plans.

199909. proposition: for every millionaire it makes,
silicon valley crushes a hundred dreamers. so you made a
difference, you're on top of the world, but for how long?
six months? twelve? everest is real. climb that. all
this silivalley stuff isn't making you a better parent. a
headhunter has had similar
thoughts.

199909. java? wait for it to mature.

199909. not happy about something? i'm working on making it easier
for you to make it easier for others. sorry, can't tell you more until you
sign this NDA ...

Robert Raisch has good insight, rooted in a traditional economic paradigm. I disagree with his link exchange philosophy: instead of bargaining for a tit-for-tat, you should simply link to the other site first as a gesture of good intent, and then invite them to return the favour. That would be the Chinese way, at any rate.